Prepare to Die! (7 page)

I don’t know how the hell strippers can dance in those boots.

Laser Beast was a reasonably handsome man. This was before his body began changing to his current near-werewolf form. There are sites all over the web discussing what he’ll be like in a few years, if he’s going to keep evolving, or (some argue) devolving. Some say he’s going to turn into an ape, then a fish, or a lizard. Some say he’s going to turn into god. And of course a lot of women say (or at least hope) that he’s going to turn up in their beds. These women have never met him in reality. These women have the tingle of fear mixed up with the itch of lust. Goddamn crazy bitches.

Back then, Laser Beast looked like a man in his early thirties, brown hair, stubble, dressed like Mr. Brady from the Brady Bunch. He had a thick and demanding stink. His clothes had holes where they’d been pierced with lasers. Those damn lasers of his… the way they blast out from anywhere… they make him hard to predict. His mind serves much the same purpose.

He looked to me.

“You’re that Reaver guy, ain’t you?” he said. His words were slurred. I felt bad about the quiver of pride that went through me. He knew my name.

“Let these women go,” I said, gesturing to Berlin and Persephone. I didn’t know which one was which. Neither of them looked like a daughter of Zeus or a German city. They both stopped dancing and looked to Laser Beast, to see what he would answer. Then, together, they remembered that they were
Not Supposed To Quit Dancing
, and they began the motions again. It wasn’t sexual at all. I don’t know how Laser Beast could have fooled himself as such.

“Fuck you,” Laser Beast said. “Fuck all these whores. Fuck this place. Fuck this city. Wanna fuck with me?” He didn’t actually seem to be talking to me. More to the whiskey bottles, I think. A laser spat out from his shoulder and clipped off the top of a bottle. He picked up the remainder of the bottle and whipped it at the two women. It hit one in her ass. She kept dancing.

“Let these women go,” I said again. I put more anger into it, this time. I don’t like violence against women. I don’t like it… not at all. It goes against nature.

“You can suck my…”

“Run!” I told the women, and I went for Laser Beast, because talking with him was the last thing I wanted to do. I’m not good at talking, and not trained on what to say to maniacs, and the nearest person who was actually trained to do it, well, he was nursing a laser wound through his stomach, so you can see where that got him.

Berlin and Persephone dived out of sight, leaping backstage, like pretty dolphins.

Laser Beast heaved a whiskey bottle at me.

The bartender and the wounded cop dropped below, behind the bar, out of sight.

The outside door, the one I’d come in, burst open.

Mick Jagger’s voice was coming through an array of speakers, singing about someone’s nineteenth nervous breakdown.

Tables and chairs began flying everywhere, as if caught in winds of
cyclone
levels, smashing against the walls, shattering from some incredible force, with a hum so overpowering that Laser Beast and I were holding our ears from the pain of it, with the debris from the tables and chairs and ketchup bottles and menus and a hundred other things pelting us, with the two of us, hero and villain, wondering what the hell had been unleashed inside the strip joint, what new thing was happening, what the fuck was going on.

Everything settled for a bit.

A dazed man appeared on the floor.

It was Warp.

“Fucking dark in here,” he said. “Couldn’t see shit at first.”

And then he disappeared again. The hum returned. And Laser Beast was lifted into the air. Knocked back down by an invisible force. Caught in a maelstrom of punches from a man who was moving too fast to be seen. I immediately saw that I wasn’t needed in the fight… that I couldn’t possibly get in on such a fight, that my measly
three-times-normal
speed was best used to escort strippers from the premises. I found Persephone and Berlin huddled in a dressing room chock full of scanty outfits and lists of “
do’s and don’ts
” on the walls, along with photos of men to watch out for. They were hiding behind a rack of clothes, regular ones, the clothes they’d come in wearing.

“Let’s go!” I told them, and I made a doorway in the wall. I might be only three times as fast as a normal man, but I’m a lot more than three times as strong. The building shuddered. The wall crumbled. I took the girls outside, walking into an assortment of eventual newspaper headlines accompanied by photos of me with the two women (Persephone turned out to be the shorter of the two) coming through the dust and the debris, a front page hero. One paper even made a historical pun, talking about me saving Berlin by knocking down a wall. Many of the newscasts speculated on whether or not I was dating the strippers. Persephone played it up like we were, hoping to coax some free publicity, a book deal, a television series, etc. She backed off when she realized that the girlfriend of a superhero gets unwelcome visits from the bad guys. She eventually made a press release saying she never knew me, and that she was a lesbian anyway. All of that came later.

By the time I’d made it onto the sidewalk, by the time I carried the two strippers out of the club, by the time I’d crossed the street, Warp and an unconscious Laser Beast were miles and miles away, moving towards the SRD base, in Greenway, Oregon.

***

I had a list in my pocket. Adele was on it, of course. It was precisely written with a permanent marker and looked to have been done with a confident hand, but that was only because I had practice, having written several earlier versions of the list, trying to decide exactly what I should do with my two weeks grace period before I… how best to put it…
reported back
to Octagon. Anyway, Adele’s name was on the list. It appeared on several lines. One of the lines just said, “Be with Adele again.” It was a line that could be interpreted in many different ways. Some of those ways had been written on earlier lists, but had been deleted for one reason or another, like fear, or… or I suppose they were all versions of fear. Humility and arrogance and all that… these things are borne from fear. Anyway… I’d shortened the list. Now… the list read.

1: Be with Adele again.

2: Take Adele on a date. (pay)

3: Talk to Greg’s parents.

4: See my house. (steal something?)

5: Talk with Judy.

6: Prepare will (Adele, Greg’s parents, Judy?, monument to Dad & Mom, Kid Crater Scholarship)

7: Visit SRD (shut them down?)

8: Fight.

I wasn’t sure what the final line item meant.
Fight
. What was that doing there? Why had I put it there? I wasn’t sure of the answer. It just seemed like it needed to be down on the paper. It hadn’t been listed on the first draft, but had appeared on the second, and had then lived through all the subsequent incarnations, most of which were scribbled onto napkins (at two different strip clubs) or advertising flyers (
Colonel Dan’s Bulk Grocery Outlet
) or menus from
City Diner
,
Hash Brown’s
, and
Vege Tables & Chairs
. Several of the earlier drafts had a question mark next to the word, so that it read as…
fight
? I hadn’t put that question mark in the final draft, but it was only because I’d grown accustomed to the word. If something is around long enough, a person tends to forget all about it, and just accept it into their lives.

I’d looked at the list about a million times. Driving home, to Greenway, it had sometimes been on my dash, stuck there with a piece of tape, and it had sometimes been in my wallet, and it had sometimes been in my pocket. It had often been in my hands. It was making me wonder about a lot of things. I wondered how small I would feel when knocking on certain doors. I wondered if my key would still fit in the door to my house. I wondered how SRD would react to my visit, and how I’d react to that reaction. I played out scenarios in my head. I wondered what to call the Kid Crater scholarship. I wondered if it should be for… sports? Arts? Bravery? How does one go about measuring bravery in the average college freshman?

I wondered about all those things.

But mostly I wondered where I would take Adele on a date.

***

My second date with Adele was a double date with Tom and Judy. We drove to Bolton to watch a romantic comedy at the Worthington Theater. I can’t remember what movie we saw. I’m pretty sure I didn’t pay any attention to it. My thoughts were consumed by making sure, during the movie, that Adele didn’t notice Judy was giving Tom a handjob. I wasn’t sure if she’d feel embarrassed, or pressured to do the same, or disgusted, or what might happen. I didn’t want to know. It was tension, but it was a pleasant version of such. I felt alive.

“Enjoying the movie?” Adele asked me. Tom and I were sitting next to each other, with the girls to either side. I was holding Adele’s hand. I couldn’t have told you if the movie was even running.

“It’s good,” I said. I was leaned forward, trying to block her view of Tom and Judy, and I was staring her in the eyes because that way I would know where she was looking.

“You’re not even watching,” she said. “You always just watch me.” Someone from behind us kicked at the back of my seat and told us to shut up.

I turned around and glared. I’ve always been good at glaring. Having an older brother develops that talent. The object of my objection was Travis Gerber, a man who was then in his fifties, a man who lived two blocks from me in Greenway, and whose wife had left him for some Bolton man, a lawyer, I think. If I was him I would have never come to Bolton. I would have blamed the town.

Travis backed away from my glare, a beaten man again. I stared at him for a couple extra seconds, making sure. He had a chocolate ball in his fingers, halfway to his mouth, frozen in time. For some reason, it made me feel a little sorry for him.

“What’s changed?” Adele told me when I turned back. I made sure to not wipe the glare right off my face, not right away. I wanted her to see that I was tough. A man.

“Huh?” I asked. Her question didn’t make any sense. The question threw me off balance and I immediately wanted popcorn. If we had popcorn, I’d have something to do with my hands. But if I had popcorn then I’d get oil and butter and salt on my fingers and I couldn’t touch her as much. I’d be afraid to touch her dress (it was red, this time) for fear of staining it, despite how Tom said there’s nothing better than staining a girl’s dress. And if I had popcorn, I’d need to get some soda, or a water, or something to douse the thirst that popcorn always gives me, and if I drank too much, or anything at all, then I’d for sure have to go to the bathroom before the movie was over, quickly becoming some huge bloated piss machine, running to the toilet and looking like a fool, and just having Adele so close to me was giving me shivers, and by that I somewhat mean that she was giving me a boner, and if I went to the bathroom I’d end up at a urinal with (this would be for sure) guys to either side of me, asking why I had a boner, demanding to know what was making me hard, and they’d probably be friends of Adele, and they would definitely tell her how I’d been in the bathroom with my buttery/salty fingers holding my
at-least-somewhat-erect
penis, and then…

“What’s changed?” Adele asked again, bringing me back to reality.

“I’m still not sure what you’re talking about,” I admitted. Tom had given me mixed signals on how to deal with girls. He’d said that honesty was always the best policy, and that the paramount thing was to never show any weakness. I was stuck between one or the other. Confusion divides the line.

Adele said, “Steve… we’ve lived together in Greenway since we were kids. You never cared much about me. Whenever you went bike riding in the quarry, or searching for fossils, or playing tennis in the park, you never wanted me along. I was always around, but you never asked if I wanted to go. You never even really looked at me. Now, lately, these past few weeks, a couple months, you’re always looking at me. So… what’s changed?”

“Jesus,” I said. I felt a little trapped. I wondered how long the movie would still run, if I could stall until the end, or if I should fake having to go to the bathroom. I wondered if I’d have to fake. I truly felt like I needed to piss.

Tom leaned over to me and said, “Don’t be mad, but I’ve been listening in. Don’t tell her a damn thing.” He didn’t whisper. Didn’t try to make sure Adele couldn’t hear. She reached over and pushed him, slowly, away from me. I was glad that she was pushing him away, but not at all glad that Adele was touching a man who was getting a handjob.

“Don’t listen to your brother,” Adele told me. “Be the smart one. Tell me what’s changed.”

“You just look better in a dress,” I said. First thing that came to mind. Well, the first thing that had come to mind past my fears and my thoughts of flight.

“That’s all?”

“I guess you look better in everything.”

“That’s as much as you can tell me?” I had a feeling she was decades older than me, or more honestly, decades smarter. She put her hand on my lap, only on my leg, but she had to have known how it scalded. It’s amazing how many things a woman knows.

“You make the town seem bigger,” I said. “Or maybe smaller. It’s just… the whole town is you. I can’t… you move so… I think…”

“Just kiss her,” Tom said, leaning over again. Judy was smiling up at me from his lap. She’d pretended to drop something on the floor. The handjob had progressed. Most of her head was covered with Tom’s coat, shielding her from view, but I could see her eyes. Adele shifted the coat so that Judy was entirely covered, then she pushed Tom away again, this time telling him not to come back, that his brother could handle himself.

Then, to me, she said, “Is that, those things you were saying, is that some sort of poetry?”